The Wineparty
(Claude Auguste, Editorial Team, Getty-History) In America, a late-night show is cancelled; in Europe, wine is put in the dock in the arts pages. And the mechanism is the same every time: constant dripping wears away the stone. No major blow, no heroic final battle. It is the humming that hardens into background noise, the daily micro-erosion of legitimacy. At first it is Read the full article…
(Editorial Team, Reuters – Photo) One could laugh if it were not so sad. The UN General Assembly is preparing an act for its 80th anniversary that places wine alongside cigarettes and crystal meth – and does so with four inconspicuous lines in the agenda item on “the prevention of non-communicable diseases”. It says, in dry terms, that it wants to Read the full article…
(Business Editorial Team, Reuters, Pic: ©Rainer Schönfeld) In China, the glass is emptying faster than anywhere else in the world. Where Bordeaux once flowed freely ten years ago and even Napa Cabernets from arch-enemy USA rose to become status symbols, entire wine shelves now stand untouched. Wine consumption in China has fallen since its peak approximately Read the full article…
(Editorial Team & Agency Material) Werner Näkel, born in 1953, has died. With him, the Ahr Valley loses an influential figure, and Germany a winemaker who, more than almost anyone else, represented the renaissance of Spätburgunder. Näkel belonged to the generation that freed German red wine from its sugary inconsequentiality in the 1980s and gave it international stature. As Read the full article…
(Claude Auguste, Editorial Team) There are wines that live from the tradition of vinification. And there are wines that were overrun by movements that believe wine is also a kind of political programme – the political statement of wine drinkers and consumers. At the end of the 1990s, the latter happened twice over: two ideological currents wanted to reinvent Chardonnay Read the full article…
(Claude Auguste, Photo: Vinea Wachau) I still remember my first Knoll wines precisely. It was in the 1990s; I was young and eager to learn, a South Tyrolean in Vienna studying “law” and perhaps a little too ambitious when it came to my young wine knowledge. Back then, when Austrian wine was still struggling for its international reputation, this bottle suddenly stood Read the full article…
(Manfred Klimek) In Eastern Europe, the Hungarian writer Imre Kertész explained to me more than thirty years ago in an interview in Budapest, communism after 1950 had despised wine culture as a bourgeois legacy and held winegrowing in low esteem (unless it was good for export revenues). By contrast, wine drinking in the small, remaining bourgeois milieu was elevated, Read the full article…
(Wineparty Investigative) There is no longer a dispute raging in the Tyrolean Sommelier Association, but a war. A war being waged personally: mercilessly, but without showing its face – and one that is now taking a heavy toll on long-serving chairman Norbert Waldnig not only as an office-holder, but as a person, as we ourselves learned in a deeply moving telephone conversation. With Waldnig, it is immediately apparent: Read the full article…
(This text previously appeared in WELT am SONNTAG; the announced Tyrol text is with our media lawyer, who does not yet want to release it. It will come tomorrow) Osterreicher (me) meets Östreicher: winemakers Kerstin and Richard Östreicher in Sommerach am Main. Layer upon layer, the vines here have reached into the earth for centuries and drawn up water and Read the full article…
(Wineparty Investigative) (Please also read the current addition at the end of the text) Yesterday we reported on a possible scandal in the Tyrolean Sommelier Association. We have photographs, WhatsApp transcripts and PDF documents – all of them indications that allow for the interpretation that insider knowledge was distributed in advance at the national championships. Hardly had the report gone online when an avalanche broke over Read the full article…
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